


Young Dumb Things

by RainofLittleFishes



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Crushes, Drone Season 2015, Fluff and Angst, Humor, Karkat meddles because it's easier than examining his own issues, Matchmaking, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Porn tease - all pale and no pail, Surprise! It's Her Imperious Fucking Condescension and She's bored~, cannibalism jokes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-01
Updated: 2015-07-01
Packaged: 2018-04-06 16:48:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4229415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainofLittleFishes/pseuds/RainofLittleFishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Request:<br/>Pitch pornstar Nepeta and deathbot technician Equius fall in real, true, fated pale love for one another. Unfortunately they're both shy weirdos off the job, so it's up to their mutual meddlefriend Karkat —an in-house scriptwriter and self-proclaimed romance EXPERT— to get these two idiots together.</p><p>Even more unfortunately, Karkat's orchestrated meet-cutes are incredibly dumb situations that only actually work in bad pornos and keep making everything worse.</p><p>Addition:<br/>(Until, finally, <em>something</em> works. Karkat assumes all the credit of course.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Young Dumb Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [roachpatrol](https://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/gifts).



> Dear Roach, you deserve 52 nice things, one for each of you. Alas, here is one thing, with an adjective of your choice.

~K~

Within a moment of meeting Equius Zahhak on set you know the following: he’s so newly molted, he’s still twitching at air currents, he has a serious obsession with bot construction and  _no clue_  about people, and some weaselmaggot’s slurryspill is going to scoop up this gawky almost underage cullbait in two shakes of a fleecy skengboar’s tail if you don’t take him under your (metaphorical) wing and make it clear that anyone who crosses you in this is going to be starring in snuff. It’s not even pale. You’ve just seen too many bright young things die in stupid ways.

Only the first two would have been obvious from his curriculum vitae.

To your everlasting ire, or at least until you get Directormentor Snatchframe fired or culled or possibly sentenced to endless torments at the hands of his people, the tribe of incompetent nookwibbles, you are only the screenwriter, and sometimes the troll wrangler, and therefore not entirely, officially, in charge of this shitbang of a production crew and the not entirely shitty actormentors. You choose to interpret this to mean that if you don’t keep this assorted clump of cretins on track and in shape, no one will.

You meddle because it offends you to consider otherwise, because all these people really are hopeless, and because it offends Snatchframe. It’s not pitch. There’s just some trolls that are jerknuggets and the universe ought to go more out of its way to explicate that to them in  _tiny words_ , like a lusus tenderly pre-masticating and regurgitating nourishment so that their grub can absorb sustenance into the labyrinthine twists of the lower digestive system without a public conveyance stop at Aspiration Station. You are doing a service to the greater universe, as you explain to Eridan, who is several star systems away and therefore on a delay as you converse in chat snippets in the wee hours of the morning. He’s nodding and making understanding noises, on delay, which is better than when everything got met with offers to go threaten people for you. It’s taken some training to get this far. You still don’t know how he planned to threaten people from another system, or why he would think you wouldn’t just do it yourself. He’s not terribly practical, your pathetic moirail.

Mothergrub only knows how you ended up in diamonds with Eridan. He’s hopeless. His greatest defense is that no alien beast will want to choke on his hair gel. Okay, that and an antique laser-rifle. And his antique dueling pistol, twin antique daggers, a set of vintage throwing knives, and a pocketful of “authentic reproduction” caltrops. And his claws. And his ridiculous unfair seadweller strength. Okay, so Eridan is as unpalatable to alien munchbeasts as he is to most trolls. It’s also easier to deal with him when you know that he can’t return early and rearrange your kitchenblock or replace your clothes with things he finds more “appropriate”.

You still pity him and want to fix him, especially when he’s especially wrong, or,  _Gl'bgolyb’s foremost optical perception orb_ ,  _ **asks for advice**_. You even miss papping his not-entirely-frilly fins and the occasional scandalously pale snuggle. But the  _thing_  about the long distance and long periods between seeing one another in person is that it’s taken some of the power struggle out of what is between you. Relationships are about boundaries and respect. The length of a few star systems has done wonders for yours.

Once upon a time, about three sweeps ago, your evil fairy grubmother, aka, Her Imperious Fucking Condescension, decided that she was bored. And so, with a few waves of her sparkly fingers, or possibly just some Imperious Fucking Orders, she returned to Alternia, exported her heir/challenger and a colony ship of assorted fools and conscripts to some backwater full of barbarian aliens, figuring, as far as you can guess, that that would keep Feferi busy for a while, and therefore out of trouble. Not that The Big Sea doesn’t  _like_  trouble, as far as you can tell she  _loves_ it, as long as it’s on her own terms, but boredom sometimes results in self-defeating habits. You can’t imagine any other reason to explain the entirety of  _The Charls Darwin Fish Wrap Nightly_.

On the newly opened stage of Alternia, The Big Sea has since set up shop and spent a few sweeps watching adults reintroduce themselves to the planet and, occasionally, telling them they can't eat her conscripts unless they've filed the correct culling forms and they've been reviewed and approved for their proposed reallocation of Her resources. The legal system just got much more entertaining and is now publically broadcast. She's revived the official porn industry and the state-run lottery, and She's reformed the previously haphazard tax code and sent Her Threshies out to enforce it. And She's kept the most potentially troublesome of Her sycophants busy hunting and frantically cooking every time She has a sudden craving for squeakbeast-eeligami or gaseous gelatinousbug bubbles. The last of these... interests... has sparked an entirely new bizarre form of public entertainment.

Last season’s  _Iron Culinarian_  used different sections of the previous season’s losers as the secret ingredient for the  _entire_  season. Horns to knucklebones, with a stop at all the organs, though they never did use the optical tissue. It was probably a problem with freezing, it absolutely did  _not_  have to do with the creepy anonymous packet of biocontacts you found in your mail chute, it was just happenstance, like the rest of the weird shit someone’s been shoving in there. You should probably stop opening it, someday it’s going to be a bomb, you’ll be the first pitch porn scriptwriter to be murdered by an obsessed fan.  If you’re going to die for your art, you’d like to get around to actually producing some beforehand, or you might as well have been preparing food prep puns for  _Iron Culinarian_.

_Tonight we’ll be marinating in stupidity, as per usual…_

Still, the show is entertaining, not terribly creative in format, but better than  _Who Wants To Pap A Mirthful Clown?_ and you sometimes like something to critique silently while you shove dinner in your face and then dump yourself into your ‘coon after a long night of managing idiots. The sudden fashion for cooking shows is only one way that The Sea’s presence has changed the entertainment economy. Another is the new fervor for actormentor-level performance from legislacerators, and the accused of course. Terezi has never been happier, or more popular. Or so you assume, you haven’t seen her in ages and she’s always been good at redirection and self-assured fronts and has only gotten better with practice. You feel an age-old pinch in your vascular pump at the thought of her, like the tiniest of crabs scuttled through.

You yourself find yourself not entirely displeased to be part of a different entertainment revival. Porn. Alas, it’s not the kind of cinematic masterpieces you envisioned, but you are determined to sneak in what few graces you can. Due to The Big Sea’s new fiscal statutes, and her army of on-planet Threshecutioners assigned to Collections, there’s a sudden gap to fill.

No more backroom sweaty-palmed shakily-shot pitch porn fight clubs. No more amateur night at the floof clubs with their pillow pits and backroom bubble baths. No more back alley deliberately instigated freak-outs with disposable pappers tossed in to do their best or die. No more sad ash setups with everyone checking their cue cards. No more plotless smug flush power couples rubbing everyone’s face in their bucket partner’s spill. At least not unless they’re paying the proper taxes on it, and amateurs generally can’t.

Audiences, aka the stupid masses, are willing to shove a lot of crap in their facial orifices, but once you start charging ‘em for it, they get  _particular_. Even the parody pornicators have night jobs now. Without killing all that many people, The Big Sea has gotten almost the entire planet to toe her lines. Maybe this is proof of Her divine right. Maybe she just got bored of killing for the usual reasons. Maybe when you’re immortal, boredom is worse than death.

That at least would explain some things. Like how whenever you mention Her, no matter how obliquely, and sometimes when you don’t, there’s a better than one in two chance that she’ll shortly thereafter horn in on your chat logs, which is still less terrifying than the few times you’ve been in Her actual presence. You may, possibly, be the first troll to have proofed your vascular pump against seizing through sheer physiological hormonal stimulation dumping _practice_.

Oh, and it might not be the biggest change as far as your fellow trolls count such things, but you do appreciate the whole pardon thing. It’s nice not to be illegal by virtue of continuing to respire. Now you at least have to wait to personally offend someone higher on the hemospectrum to get culled. You may possibly owe your fairy grubmother a thank you or something, but you can’t quite shake the feeling that she’s doing it all for ships and glubbles anyhow.

You sort of regret that there won’t be more amateur films from the floof clubs. Watching two or more sadsacks in a tub of bubbles or pile of pillows might have left you cold and nostalgic for brine, but you could usually tune in and drop out for at least a few minutes. You keep a tankful of your favorites in the kitchenblock where you can remember necessities like food and water and charging pads. Late at day when you can’t sleep, sometimes you just head to the kitchenblock and overfeed your pale porn grubs.

They’ve returned your wasteful extravagance with a half dozen natural grown hybrids. Natural hybrid grubs never make any sense when played, usually just a series of surreal scenes and weird smells. You play them anyway. Sometimes it’s the closest you can get to sleep.

 

~*~

You are the arrogant seatroll in a cadet’s uniform on the other end of the universe. No, not that one. No, not that one either. Or that one. Or... Oh for Gl'bgolyb’s leftmost tittycakes! The one with the caltrops, none of the other swimmy trolls are carrying those.  _Swimming_ , you know. Kind of defeats the point(s).

Right. So you’re Eridan Ampora and you really wish you could discuss this with your diamond, but you can’t, for obvious reasons.

You have a sinking feeling that Her Imperious Condescension is making  _moves_  on your moirail.

You’d fight Her, you’d die for him, that sounds a  _lot_  easier than a lot of other things you’ve done for him, or tried to do, usually a variation of LEARN TO THINK BEFORE YOU ACT OR ELSE WE’RE OVER, SO HELP ME, but there’s one reason you can’t.

Karkat is only alive because Her Imperious Condescension deemed it so. You’d give Karkat everything if you could, but the Condesce  _really can_. If you asked him to decide, he might stick with you because he’s good at denying himself, good at assuming he doesn’t deserve  _everything_. If he chose you, you’d always wonder. If he chose Her, well, at least he’d be set. At least until She changed her mind. Fuck.

You force that out of your own mind. Even Her Imperious Fucking Condescension knows how rare the Sufferer’s only known scion is. Even Her Imperious Fucking Condescension knows how precious Karkat is, though you don’t know why she’s fixated on him pale. She’s always sending him gifts, things you can’t afford, or know he’d find too wasteful to use without regret. Jewelry and fancy cuts of meat and rare scents and wound salves and old books.

And if he refuses delivery of a planet’s ransom of set gems, or re-gifts the rare fabrics to the costume department, or dumps the food down a wasteworm or on the wiggler techs' breakroom table, and doles out only the tiniest dabs of salve and hoards the books like a dragon lusus, well, maybe it’s funny that he never  _really_  seems to notice his secret admirer and maybe you should be grateful she doesn’t want him dead. Maybe. You’re angry and scared and smug and twisted in knots that only your diamond could straighten out.

You’re a little proud of yourself for being so romantically selfless. You’re definitely not telling your moirail. You definitely don’t ask yourself what Kar would have advised if this hypothetical didn’t center on him. You definitely don’t ask yourself what Fef would have done, or wonder how she is.

 

~E~

You have not yet met your superior, Directormentor Snatchframe, when you are waylaid by a short stocky troll in gray. Most disconcerting, you can’t tell his blood color until he looks up at you through a set of thin wire-framed smoked glasses, and even then you can only guess between brown and rust. He certainly doesn’t look in the least intimidated by your hue.

“There you are, Zahhak, you’re early, unlike the rest of these indolent slothbeasts. Schedule says an hour past dusk, so they won’t actually get here for another two and Snatchframe won’t stroll in fondling himself for at least half again as long.”

His voice is lower than you expected, he sounds several sweeps older than you, like his stature is unfortunate and not merely a work in progress, much like his low horns. You've reared back at his crudeness, eyes wide and ears pinned, spine straight and chin tucked, the very picture of your lusus that one time a ruffian swore at you on Trype, but he’s seized your wrist and is already turning away. You try to extricate yourself without breaking anything but he has a very firm grip. You stumble after, free hand clenching and releasing as your free arm flails, already feeling the dreaded, expected, prickling of sweat at your joints and brow, the edges of your scalp. The scales of the hand on your wrist are clearly adult patterned, nails filed neatly in the typist style, knuckles scarred. If he tells you what to do, he’s probably not bluffing.

There’s three other crew members draped over couches in the otherwise unpopulated room, all three asleep or focused on palmtops or some inefficient combination of the two. None of them so much as look at you being hauled away down the hall by a midget, but it still feels like you’re the center of a terrible attention.

People make you nervous. You never know what to say or do, only that it’s never quite right. You think about Aurthour and that this position is an opportunity to stay on Alternia longer. You lusus isn’t well. It may be his natural lifecycle, but you still cannot bring yourself to cull him unless he asks. You cannot bring yourself to leave him behind. In the age of Her Imperial Condescension’s unexpected return, there are now jobs for adults on the homeworld. Legal ones. Places for an engineer to use their skills outside piracy. That at least is a relief, because licensed porn producers are perfectly legal, and your very own temerity still stuns you. You don’t like to think about what you would have done if you had reached Ascension before The Return.

Your guide doesn’t actually introduce himself until you’ve found yourself ensconced in the studio’s cramped but possibly well-stocked machine shop, two stories of walls covered in shelving, aisles cluttered, floor littered with scraps. You find yourself relaxing a bit as he picks his way through the narrow aisles and pokes through a few bits on the other side of the room. You let your hands fall and your shoulders unhitch as you notice the floor tools, mostly hidden under drifts of incidental debris.

You start to shuffle through the clutter to catalog your resources. On the floor level, the main level, you discover a laser cutter under a pile of greasy papers smelling of fried fish, weighed down by several mallets. There’s a welder power supply, crowned in a cracked welding mask and a string of gaudy fake pearls. There’s a single leather glove, fingers painted, cuff tattered. Gas tanks, all registering as half full to empty, fortunately all off, are spray-painted with signs and clustered with stacks of metal rods and coils of wiring, nesting in a drift of papers and possibly straw. A twin trollbot capacity biotank is shoved against the farthest wall, empty but for a scummy residue. There’s a lovely massive waterjet standing in a puddle of water and dampened shop towels and takeout containers, bones and all. The floor drain is clogged with something hairy. The wall units are crammed tight, with either supplies covered in junk or just junk. The room smells damp, with the undertone of fried food and rotting meat. You hope the ventilation works, and that nothing important has corroded. You wonder what your budget is.

Your guide looks disgusted and marches out into the hallway and back without the courtesy of an explanation. He returns with a handful of large trash bags and tosses you one as he opens another and starts stuffing it with the more obvious debris, shaking pieces as he goes to be sure nothing important is discarded. He grumbles as he does, a sort of diatribe regarding the former tech’s lineage and bucket habits, the perversities of their lusus and former moirail. You don’t move to open your bag, all too certain that it would just rip. He ignores you and just keeps going. There’s an almost empty waste receptacle under the main table. You start to fill it.  

He’s built to adult proportions but as he explains your duties and curses the prior tech and passes behind a thoracic height deathbot, sans mobility units, he disappears. You nod and reply at the appropriate points and he stalks around periodically poking and snatching and disappearing and reappearing through the mounds of disorganized supplies and broken projects. The last deathbot technician really was a most regrettable slob. You wonder if they resigned or were culled. Perhaps they were merely reassigned. There’s evidence of teal bloodstains all over the room, but it’s all in tiny quantities, a cut here, a scratch there, much like your own hive during a project, before Aurthour tidied up. There are no outright puddles or uncharacteristically clean spots, at least not here on the floor level.

It’s almost an hour later before most of the obvious debris are collected and you receive a list of pending assignments from your guide, learning his name in the process. You check the deadlines as Vantas dumps one of his three bags on top of your waste receptacle full of rusty fasteners, rotting bionics and corroded components far past recycling. He proclaims that you are now making an epic quest to the dumpsterbug. Hidden behind your own towering load of rust and rot you don’t see any of the trolls he greets on the trip. Myryan. Blurnt. Baysweet. Cinematography. Sound editing. Costuming. He introduces you as “Zahhak, the newest 'bot minion, Mothergrub knows he can’t be worse than the last”.

You don’t notice when in this process you stopped sweating, but when he leaves you’re not even breathing quickly. It is a relief to know your job, your tasks, your place. The reorganization alone will be a formidable task, and you will, of course, have to keep up with the studio’s technical needs, especially if you plan to set aside space to maintain your own supplies for clients. When you hit Ascension age, your hive and allowance were lost to you. Since moving to the city with Aurthour, you don’t have the luxury of a personal workshop.

When Directormentor Snatchframe stops in to inspect you and your efforts, you’ve cleaned out the debris at the center of the the main level and have the first of tomorrow’s primitive deathbots on the reclaimed table and under reconstruction, having elected to salvage what you can for efficiency and start over entirely once you’ve gotten ahead in the production timeline. Were you a bit more aware of your superior, you might have noted that he is a moderately large seadweller of only modest hygiene. You raise your head and blink and make suitable sounds and he goes away again. Immersed in your project, however primitive, you don’t even feel nervous, at least not until you get dragged out for introductions by a very loud short troll who considers himself in charge. 

It is in this manner that you enter the inexorable orbit of Karkat Vantas.

 

~N~

Karkat has already commandeered the newest meat when you arrive. It’s one of the things you love about Karkat, that he has this prickly angry exterior and this soft gushy interior that can’t help but care, even about the dumb techs that are dueling it out with sound booms on the catwalk for entries in  _The Fish Wrap_. He yells because he cares. And because he’s a control freak. It’s cute.

You don’t know anyone else who would have written a condolence message to a lusus. When Snatchframe’s ex-moirail bled out in the prop room two weeks ago after fooling around with someone’s longsword, coincidentally dipped in an anticoagulant poison, no one really  _missed_  him. It’s not like he was doing his job keeping the ‘bots in order anyhow. So maybe Snatchframe unbent enough to be broody in a different way than normal. They were terrible moirails, both hoarders, that’s why they broke up and how they disrupted production for three preyforsaken perigees in the process. Snatchframe can’t bear to destroy film. Anleez couldn’t bear to discard  _anything_. You don't know if he was always off like that or if he just never learned otherwise. His Maggiepie lusus couldn't make it to the funeral because he was too busy feeding a new hoard of stolen grubs and fending off raids by their real lusii. Anleez Clutzer had issues. 

You would have felt worse but you’re still mad about the rotting biomechbots that dropped maggots everywhere when you clawed them open. Your costar at the time, Mernik, a brawny gold with very deft hands and a dry sense of humor, looked ready to vomit, but you both finished the scene, complete with triumphant back-to-back almost final stand and resulting make outs, because that’s your job and you’re professionals.

Mernik sued Snatchframe for extra-contractual work fees for you both. Snatchframe paid with only a few complaints, probably because Mernik’s moirail could have made his life hell and Snatchframe always tried to protect Anleez, even if he never managed to make him self-sufficient. You still can’t believe that the propagandarerists managed to spin the rotting mechs as a  _drawing_  point. Ugh.

Karkat had to rescue some of the sound, lighting, and maintenance techs who were coopted into cleanup duty. They started a maggot fight and didn’t notice that some of the maggots were live flesh variety. You love how Karkat can make extracting flesh-eating maggots from a sound tech’s auditory canals into a comedy, complete with arm waving and medically necessitated ear boxing. Among the mysteries of Alternia are: how did Anleez survive to 15 sweeps when at least some of them had to be spent enlisted, from whence comes this endless supply of stupid techs, and how does Karkat Vantas care so damn much and not get culled or explode. It’s cute. And frustrating.

And maybe if you weren’t a pitch porn star and his profile didn’t state “Concupiscently Quad-locked” at a violet level even though he absolutely _isn’t_  in pitch or flush with anyone, he’s told you himself, well, maybe you could have been more than furrenemies. Your red quad?  _ **Wide open**_.

You strip, don a robe, and let makeup and wardrobe take over, letting your mind wander as you dissect the newest crewmember. Tall. Thin. Gawky as a half-grown hoofbeast. Easy prey, for all that he’s a blue and his frame seems to indicate a growth spurt in progress. He keeps his head tucked in company unless directly addressed, and it’s not with the body language of  _protecting-my-throat_  or  _brandishing-my-horns_. You think he’s just shy. Adorably so.

You think on the lovely dorsal arch of his nose, the blue blush like water rushing in to surround each of his cheek scales, the twist of his bitten lips, the even more brief flash of his eyes behind smoked glasses like Karkat’s, all glimpsed before the dark curtain of his hair fell shut again and Karkat let him scuttle back off into the gadget block after compulsory introductions. You think of the nervous twitch of his ears, elegant despite his unfinished build. Utter pale crush bait. Like ‘nip to Mom.

His hair is clean and straight, his clothes barely wrinkled under a layer of stains that look tonight-recent. That at least bodes well for his competency. You don’t think you could allow yourself to crush on someone cruising for an entry in  _The Wrap_.

You can’t quite help yourself, and you don’t really try. You’re in the business of fantasy and you share all night long. This little fantasy can be yours, something private. You’ve learned to breeze past your own awkwardness mostly by bluffing and sticking to situations where you know the terms of social engagement. He need never know what thoughts his awkwardness and strange elegance engender in you.

He’s young and still filling in, cold enough to be behind the Ascension-age maturity curve. His scales are still wiggler-fine, barely connected along the backs of his hands peeking through the back of his gloves. And even if you couldn’t tell by the texture along his hands and face that his skin hadn’t hit full adult thickness, you could tell by his knees, because he’s wearing shorts like a wiggler in a schoolfeed and his knees are scabby and still pebbled like the rest of him with tiny just-past-wiggler scales.

Your own knees might be scarred and scarred again, but you’ve long since grown into your thicker adult scales, heavy along your front and back, lighter and more deeply creased in vulnerable areas, where you bend and flex. You work hard to keep your flexibility, and not just because it’s been a meal ticket. Too long inactive during a growth season would lose you precious range. Most adults settle for a space somewhere on the standard bellcurve. You aren’t just proud of your extreme outlier status. You might just come undone if you lost the serenity you distill from your stretching and strength exercises.

You raise an arm and let the wrap drop off as two of Blythe’s minions apply tint and darken your thoracic scars before they buff your scales. Blythe usually at least supervises makeup on primaries but there’s a crowd of stunt crew to paint tonight and they’re in the ventilation station getting spray-painted white. Blythe is supervising because without supervision the makeup minions will probably spray each other.

Not for the first time you regret that Karkat writes nice references for competent crew members that make it through a sweep of service and want to try their skills elsewhere. It means you have a constant influx of new meat to break in, and it means that the not entirely incompetent bad influences tend to linger for lack of better prospects. Karkat and Snatchframe have so far failed to actually cull anyone, no matter how many flesh wounds Karkat’s dealt or how many times Snatchframe muses aloud about the dramatic artistic power of real death onscreen. You don’t think Karkat’s caught on that some of the middle minions (not new meat, or old hands, but a mix of competent and possibly-competent–at-some-future-point, have taken to calling him DadMom behind his back. Some night, some glorious night, you’re going to inform him of his new title. Some night, but not tonight.

Tonight you’re the Mighty Thewed Huntress: Mainframe Hive Technician Edition. You can’t wait to see what they come up with for CG bees, Snatchframe about had a conniption when Karkat suggested that they hire an animal speaker and just use the real deal. Snatchframe opposes most of Karkat’s suggestions, which seems counterproductive considering he can’t seem to get rid of Karkat as screenwriter. Their enduring power struggle is one of the perks in the unofficial recruitment brochure. You wonder who recruited Equius Zahhak, and if they used the official or unofficial recruitment materials.

You lower your other arm after one last dusting of full body shimmer and step into the jumpsuit with its strategic cutouts. You think about how Equius Zahhak’s horns are almost precisely symmetrical, just like yours, and how, also just like yours, one of them is a barely discernible shade different where a section had to regrow. That hurts. Not the regrowth, but the initial break and the perigees for the inner sections to grow enough to protect the core. No one else remembers that painful winter, not since your lusus died. You spent a lot of time in your cave and when spring came you had mostly stopped misjudging distances. That’s when you went from fast and flexible to fast, flexible, and muscular, caught all winter with nothing to do but eat Mom’s kills and do reps. Spring was like emerging from your cocoon again. 

You wonder if Equius had someone to look after him when it happened. You hope he did. The color difference is so slight it must be an old injury, his lusus was probably able to take care of him. You wonder if the transition between old and new growth is as numb and oddly sensitive for him as it is for you and you barely stop your fingers from twitching.

You do up the extraneous pre-distressed straps on one arm as wardrobe works on those on your legs. You pull the thick leather strap over your bicep tight but not too tight and hold it with your teeth as you set the prong. There’s a brief argument from below as one of Baysweet’s minions contends that that  _wasn’t part of the sketch_  and the other shout-whispers  _authenticity_. You don’t bother to tell them that most of the straps won’t be making it past tonight’s engagement, or that tonight's production isn’t the type that keeps track of such things. The one you did four weeks ago, yes, the ones you hope to do once Equius gets the shop running again, yes. This week with its trippy camp? Not so much. 

You switch arms and you flick off a hand that wanders from thigh strap to your butt and issue a firm “no”. You don’t let a sneer arch your nose. You don’t growl. The one big problem with being a pitch porn star is that people have expectations. Just because they paid to view your performance, or they’re on set to see it happening, doesn’t mean you’re going to fulfill their fantasies in a more personal manner. You give them what they want in fantasies and you owe them nothing else.

You envy how Karkat can just shout all the wiggler techs into compliance. Sometimes it takes a few nights for one to be suitably intimidated, usually when he gets a bit more _creative_ than just shouting, and about the time they figure out who’s been bringing in the best snacks and maintaining the first aid kit, but what seems to work best for you is to maintain more reserved relations with the new meat. You’re on good terms with almost all the old hands, and with your memory it’s no problem keeping track of everyone, but you don’t actually call the wigglers by name unless they prove you won’t regret acknowledging them. There’s only so many “fans” you can endure before you either flee for the rafters or toss some into them.

You don’t actually mind the acting, more often than not it’s fun, or at least challenging. There was a bug in your schoolfeeds and you didn’t learn to read or write until you were half-grown, but you’ve always been good at memorizing, and the scripts, as short as they are, even since Karkat came on board and they’ve doubled and tripled twice and thrice over, are effortless, whatever past coworkers may have complained. Between shooting nights though, you mostly stay at hive, drawing, sleeping, reading scripts, running your adult Purrsona through games with online friends, doing endless reps of crunches and handstands and lunges and leaps and tumbles. Sometimes you knit, and unravel it, and just run the yarn through your fingers and against your face. 

You have a studio hive, with the ‘coon on the platform level. You usually do a few dozen springs up without using the stairs, or pull yourself up with your arms, drop flip back down. It’s the closest you can get in the city to some of your hunting moves, and it gives you a muscular propulsion system that’s advantageous on set.The propagandarerists usually manage to work in your “mighty thews” into any and all publicity releases. The Mighty-Thewed Solitary Huntress. That’s usually you.

Though sometimes you’re the Primitive Yet Ravishing Barbarian, aka The Noble Savager. Or the Steadfast and Unconquerable Legislacerator, the Fierce and Terrible Conscript Trainer, or Only One of Her Imperious Condescension's Elite, all Mighty-Thewed, of scarred but well-shined scale. Sometimes you're the Rebellious Lowblood, aka The Dirty Temptress, but your character usually dies in those, conveniently sidestepping getting culled in the end for propriety’s sake. You have, like, a tank full of pitch grubs showcasing your showy fake deaths, which Karkat says is morbid as fuck, but he still eats your candied roe so clearly it’s not affecting his appetite.

You swat him whenever he teases that your future title will be Mightythews and if it leads to flailing and play wrestling, well, that’s the closest you’ve been able to maneuver him toward your longstanding flush fantasies of him. You’ll take what you can get, even if the closest you ever get to post-coital cuddling is a few moments of him panting and laughing against your chest, the rise and fall of his ribs faster than yours, the weight of him somehow more real and important than any of your fantasies. It’s not like he doesn’t  _know_  you like him that way. It’s really difficult to prevaricate with pheromones and you might manage on set, but you don’t  _do_  that with furriends, you have few enough of them, you’re not going to _lie_.

You don’t have many close neighbors, not since you moved someplace with good soundproofing. You’re furrenemies with Karkat, sometimes you have sleepovers and watch movies and argue, but you don’t actually know many people in the city outside work and it’s hard to make furriends in real life, especially when you never know who already “knows” you from your work.

It’s not just the trolls that want to fulfill their pitch fantasies. You know all about how people like to put themselves in the position of one of the onscreen characters. Sometimes they imagine they’re you. Sometimes they imagine they’re  _with_  you. Sometimes they want to pap you, and that just hurts, because they don’t know you, not at all. You’re not a savage barbarian. You can bench press your costars, you can and have killed springbuckbeasts and such with nothing but your thighs and hands, but you’re not  _feral_. You might keep your talons long, but they’re tools, you’re not going to let them go unmaintained. You can type just fine. Dammit, you’re not illiterate!

Once, early on in your rise to the top of the Condesce’s now-sanctioned porn industry, or at least this quadrant of it, you let your guard down and dated one of the lighting techs. Trevoa had nice steady hands, but even thinking of her makes you sick now. Knowing that all the time she thought she was  _taming_  you? Moirails should be pale like something pure for one another, no matter the shared secrets. They should halve each other’s burdens. Bad moirails double the weight. There’s a difference between pity that wants you to improve and pity that enjoys condescending to you. There should be different words, because they’re  _nothing_  like each other.

It’s at times like this that you most miss your lusus and the plains of your wigglerhood, tongue baths and all. She’s long gone, but the skills you learned in wigglerhood let you survive on vermin in the city long enough for a recruiter to find you.

In a way, it doesn’t matter that you’re successful at what you do, that plenty of people envy your “spongy confection promenade” of a job. You still don’t feel at home in the city. It feels like… like you’re waiting. This is all just waiting for something. You shake yourself free of the thought. You need to get into tonight’s character, and get on with it. A job worth doing is worth doing well and you pride yourself on professional work, even if it makes wigglers giggle. Even if sometimes it makes you giggle.

Nadein winks at you from across the room, flashes a tiny sneer. You let your own nose crinkle in return and turn away as she heads past to tonight’s set. Neither of you laugh, even if it  _is_  funny. You like Nadein, she’s one of your favorite co-actormentors. She’s funny and fit and she usually doesn’t need more than one or two takes, no matter how ridiculous the scenario or Snatchframe’s temper tantrums if he thinks Karkat came up with a good idea and he needs to piss all over it first to make it his. With Nadein you get a good clean fight and then you get messy in a way that will send you both home well compensated.

 _Authenticity_  tightens the last strap until it creaks. You stretch and shake, run through a few punches and flips. The buckles ring. It’s ridiculous and would be dangerous in a real fight, but you have a full range of mobility and nothing’s cutting off circulation. You head onto set and set aside thoughts of the newest bot tech. You wonder if he’d shiver or just flinch if you traced the just-barely-connected dorsal scales of his nose with a gentle claw.

 

~E~

You’re finally starting to think maybe this won’t be a terrible disaster from beginning to end when you prove yourself wrong. You’ve got tomorrow’s ‘bots ready, even if they’re not really your work, and you came out to tell Directormentor Snatchframe, and settled for Vantas as the Directormentor was “canoodling with a grasping appendage up his ass”. At least according to Vantas.

You feel yourself blushing and just wait for him to comment, to ask you how you dared to think you could run tech for a porn and not combust. He doesn’t. There are more people now, and you can feel the prickling of anxiety at being observed. You tuck your head and let your hair try to hide your shame. As it falls over your face you catch another glimpse of Nepeta Leijon, one of the studio’s primaries. You’ve never watched a pitch porn, but even you know her face, plastered all over the gossip rags and forums. There's a billboard by the spaceport showcasing her next release in which she's wearing only furs and jade. It would be impossible not to know of her. 

There are three trolls dusting her with more shimmering makeup as a crowd of people change out the set. Her eyes are very carefully blank, her mouth likewise, the muscles of her ears visibly tense, one foot thumping like a hummingbeast on the floor. She feels like a storm, as if she's ready to explode into motion and is only allowing that one outlet to bleed it off.

You want to see her smile. Not for the camera, or for an audience, but because something pleased her, stilled that contained energy to a gentle happiness, even for a moment. That is all sorts of inappropriate. You flee to your new domain. Soon you’re engrossed in the next project on your list and you don’t even notice the passage of time.

 

~K~

Zahhak is either all kinds of efficient or overconfident, and while you really, really hope it’s the former, with even the briefest of inventories of the current population of ninnies the odds don’t look good. He scurries off in his little wiggler’s knee-shorts, Mothergrub, it’s like he’s  _trying_  to antagonize some lackwit into making a pass at his barely legal uptight bottom, and you round up the last of the unruly lighting and sound techs and herd everyone into the set for  _Scene One: Sexy Computer Tech Traverses Alternian Wilderness To Distant Recluse’s Hive, Battling Lusii En Route_.

You’re already running two hours behind schedule, as usual, and you can’t even bring yourself to regret spending the first hour of your night hauling trash. It’s obviously the most productive thing that you will accomplish tonight. You ignore thoughts of Sollux snickering over this setup. The Big Sea let Her heiress take Her Helmsman’s descendant as part of her inheritance. Sollux is probably too busy conquering aliens in Feferi’s name, or bringing them hive as pets, to manage to fondle his own shameglobes more than twice a drone cycle. Not that you’ve managed as much, even if you’ve had less excuse than that wiping sniffnubs and cleaning ears just taking the concupiscent drive straight out of you. Clearly the main reasons trolls don't raise their own bucketsprogs. You'd all go extinct within a generation. 

You find one of the “lusii” hiding under a table in the prep area and fish her out, confiscate her palmtop and shoo her in with the rest of the herd. She blinks with the slightly dazed frown of someone unexpectedly roused from the mire of Alternia’s web, but she moves in the correct direction so you refrain from reminding her to roll when she hits the ground. Nepeta has never yet  _accidentally_  killed anyone, but there’s only so long a winning streak like that can hold out. You’re still short a lusus and you pull up your list and compare it to whom you’ve actually seen tonight.

Xerses Serrex. Aurochbird number five. Purpleblooded layabout extraordinaire. You envy how Nepeta gets instant respect from the new meat. You’ve only ever managed to outshout them.

|Snatchframe Studio: License Type: Drone Prep Non-Instructional <3</<3 #6.8V-Sweep-6,854: Subcontract # 465 subclass C: Contact Initiated by Overskreer Vantas|

KV: SERREX. WHERE ARE YOU? YOU’RE SIGNED IN AND MYSTERIOUSLY INCORPOREAL.

XS: have to call in sick,, boss-boss.. fey clown soirees,, you know--bobo.. very fairy hush--hush,, don’'t know what terrible bioweapons might have been in the punchy--punch.. can'’t risk spreading it to the tender warmer hues and their tender warmer... ... thews..

KV: SICK OR HUNGOVER? BECAUSE IF IT’S THE LATTER AND YOU’RE NOT IN WITHIN HALF AN HOUR YOU’LL BE CALLING OUT FOR CULLED.

XS: shall i bend over and cough--cough??

KV: KEEP YOUR DIRTY FLIRTATIONS AND FRONDS TO YOURSELF.

XS: have a hearty--heart,, Vantass.. 

|Window override initiated. Her Imperious Fucking Condescension has commandeered your Shoutbox.|

)(IC: Need a fork, small fry?

KV: NO!

)(IC: I could take care of her for you. I could even just arrange a harmless little legislacerator herring if you pike. Or a little chat with the gill. She doesn’t bream to be taking her duties very seariously and little minnows tend to flounder when they get in over their heads. And of course I only want the _very best_ for my guppy. Though, speaking as the voice of experience, it’s betta not to let them skate by. Sometimes you just have to lance a boil before the infection spreads. So. What do you spray, little grayling?

KV: NO, THANK YOU, OH EVIL FAIRY GLUBMOTHER.

)(IC: Whale, if you eel that way for prow... When you’ve shad it with wrasseling them, throw me a line and I’ll take care of it, whomever it is. No need to play koi, I’m solely here to kelp, little snapper. You’re my sweetest little flush red sprat. I just thought I’d offer.

KV: OH SWEET NETHER DRIPPINGS, DO YOU REALLY HAVE TO FLUSH FLIRT WHEN MY OPTICAL PERCEPTIONS ARE ALREADY OVERWHELMED WITH STUPIDITY?!

)(IC: I’m so very saury to cause you such stress when your life sounds so very difficult. I could rub your back and listen to you carp about fins until your wobbegong? Or I could help you work through that frustration in a more direct manner. You’d look so very cute perched on my lap screaming for your coddess.

KV: DID YOU SEARIOUSLY JUST HIT ALL FOUR QUADS LIKE A REELY AMBITIOUS PORN…

KV: YOU KNOW WHAT? WE’RE NOT DOING THIS. IS THERE SOMETHING YOU NEEDED OR DID YOU JUST WANT TO GET IN YOUR WEEKLY BARBS WHILE PROVING YOU DON’T CARE WHAT THE BLABDROIDS PRINT ABOUT YOUR DEVIANCY? IS IT DEVIANCY WHEN YOU'RE ALREADY IN CHARGE? I DON’T EVEN KNOW. I GIVE UP. YOU CAN MAKE MANDATES AND BREAK MANDATES AND THE REST OF US JUST TRY NOT TO DROWN. TRY NOT TO BREAK TOO MANY OF US BECAUSE YOU’RE BORED. I KNOW THAT’S HARD BECAUSE YOU’RE OLDER THAN SOME VOLCANIC ISLANDS, BUT THE REST OF US DON’T LIVE FOREVER AND TEND TO BE FOND OF WHAT TIME WE HAVE, HOWEVER STUPID THAT MAKES US.

KV: …

KV: ARE YOU GOING TO CULL ME NOW? BECAUSE IF YOU AREN’T I SHOULD GET BACK TO MY SCADS OF WORK.

)(IC: Deviancy. It amuses me that you should sink it so. In fact, I consider it IRON)(IC. I’m not your anemone, bitterling. How bleak you must think this world, how full of roe, and yet you don’t want to breaker it. How _is_ the little catfish this go around?

KV: IS THAT A SEA OR WAVE ON THAT CULLING, BECAUSE LIKE I SAID-

)(IC: I’ll send you some chocolate truffles this time. No organ meats, since you bream so suspicious about their origin. Eat some. They’re not spiked with anyfin, I promise.

KV: ABOUT THE SURPRISE ATTACK GIFTS…

)(IC: Happiness is a warm red guppy. ~

|Her Imperious Fucking Condescension has left the podium. You are being returned to your interrupted window.|

XS: Vantas??

XS: … …

XS: was only smoking--joking..

XS: Vantas??

KV: ARE YOU REALLY SICK?

XS: no?? no..

KV: THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING. BE HERE. DON’T DO THIS AGAIN. OR YOU’LL NEED TO FIND ANOTHER POSTING AND I WON’T BE ABLE TO PROVIDE YOU WITH A REFERENCE.

|Shoutbox closed|

 

You do one last circuit of the grounds, find Equius immersed in the bot shop and both costumers immersed in the prop room and you prowl on into the filming with a deep breath. You’re a professional. You  _never_  interrupt a scene just because they’re not doing it correctly, at least not unless it’s about to make  _The Wrap_. And however much you loathe your directormentor, he has a nose for where the caegars are. He’s probably picked that nose recently, and wiped it on a doorknob somewhere, but it will take more than that to drive you off. He will not win.  

Since Snatchframe has a platonically pathetic aversion to going outside, the “Alternian Wilderness” tonight is a series of holoboxes and piping, which, so long as CG funding lasts, will now be a forest. Or jungle. Or some place with a few miserable trees, it really just depends on whatever the graphicweenies are drinking at the time and how recently they ran out. They're offsite anyhow and aren't your problem. Mostly. The “lusii” are all trolls chosen for athletic prowess and conveniently symbolic horns, outfitted in white bodysuits and makeup.

Just as eerie as their blanched color is the dead matte white of the makeup. There’s not a shimmer of scale shine on them, even their  _horns_  are painted. They’ve got full contacts to cover the yellows of their eyes with just the iris and pupil to show through. The effect is like a convention of ghost mimes. You already know that the main audience for the resulting oeuvre is going to be high clowns and wigglers on dares. No one will ever notice your witty dialogue or even Yvette’s acrobatic choreography. Doomed. You are doomed.

You settle in behind Snatchframe with your palmtop to keep track of all the ways he’s doing things wrong. You see a makeup wiggler get cut out of the herd for the prep room and your palmtop communicates that Serrex has reported in. In person this time. Good. You hate to waste threats. And you still feel a little sick with _Surprise! Not dead_ , no matter how often it happens.  

 

~N~

You do a last run through to be sure everyone has the blocking and choreography and then run into it at full speed. You swing from the horizontal pipes, swing round vertical ones, run up and down slanting ones meant to be thin branch bridges. You leap and bound and pounce and flip, defeating wild “lusii” at every turn. A camera on a boom swoops in and circles and you do a slow survey of your territory, breath artfully just a shade faster. You lick your lips and let yourself grin like your mother, slow, triumphant. The camera holds steady. You yawn and let your tongue curl, let your mouth click shut and you wink. Scene close.

Snatchframe seems pleased, Yvette is shaking her head and finger at a few of the lusii, Karkat’s hunched over the back of Snatchframe’s chair telling him off. Business as usual. The Directormentor is of average height and breadth for a seadweller of his moderate age. Karkat is… about a third of that. You probably can’t blame your profession for that one fantasy you have about scooping him up and ravishing him in a tree. Probably.

Karkat loves romcoms except when he writes a pitch romance and  _Snatchframe_  adds in the comedy. Karkat maintains that Snatchframe has a terrible sense of humor. He hasn’t figured out that Snatchframe’s sense of humor is basically anything that pisses him off and sells. The humor in it for you is that Karkat still hasn’t figured out that it’s pitch flirting. He also hasn’t figured out that the wall of photos,  _Wrap_  clippings, and sketches in your hive is a diagram. You’d think the black yarn connecting theirs would be a sufficient hint, but Karkat can be spectacularly dense.

Also, you may have a lot of yarn in general, mostly for a series of scarves that you seldom finish. You made Karkat a gray one, several gray ones actually, though you only gave him one, and Baysweet’s is her moirail’s teal. Blythe got one in lime green with sparkles on the ends because they don’t care what people think and they make it look good despite that, or perhaps because of it.

You don’t really have many people to whom you  _can_  give finished projects, so you mostly unwind them and start over. Your fingers twitch with the phantom sensation of your needles. Equius’s blue would make a really pretty scarf. You shake your head. You are not so far gone into depravity as to line your reading niche with reminders of a pale crush fantasy of less than a night. Even if it's struck you with the force of a killing strike.

One of the lusii is limping, he hit at a bad angle. You know Karkat is already feeling guilty, or will be as soon as he notices, but you don’t. They know their jobs and it doesn’t include a last minute improvisation where, oops, the lusii win. You’ve taken down bigger trolls, on set, and for real. If “Terrorbirdisaur 2” can’t get over himself and follow directions, limping will be the least of his problems.

You end up running through the scene three more times, adding a few flourishes here and there to give editing plenty to work with. You do the whole thing with all of Karkat’s witty dialogue and the occasional extemporaneous in character bee pun of your own. One of the psionics manages to muster up enough juice to buzz you a few times and does a pretty good screechbird as she does. You get all the way through the take before you let yourself giggle. The herd of techs and lusii change out the holoblocks and pipe frames and set up the  _Edifice in the Wilds_. You’re going to do part of scene two, the part with  _“Hello, It is I, the Wandering Computer Repair Tech, Wink, Wink”_  and Nadein’s  _“Do Come in Innocent Traveler, Wink, Wink”_ , but the fight with the deathbot security system is going to have to wait for tomorrow, or whenever the new tech can get things running.

If this particular title was of a more serious genre, you’d be worried because the damage to your strappy coveralls is unlikely to match going from scene two to scene three. That’s okay. Wrestling and flipping “lusii” has gotten you nicely warmed up. Nadein is ready and you move to the next set, full of fragile and expendable clutter, to make a mess and to shred each other’s equally silly and impractical clothing and have some very showy daywalker and repair-tech sex. Too bad about the lack of bees, you bet the hum feels fantastic.

 

~N~

A few hours later you’re sweaty and smell exactly like what you’ve been up to as you sip electrolyte solution and allow Karkat to rant at you. It’s a little awkward how Snatchframe foists him off on you when he wants a break. You’re not angling for ash with either of them and the thought of Snatchframe in any of your quads makes you feel slimy. Maybe that’s an ironic line to have considering your profession and all the things that  _don’t_  bother you but it is what it is. In the absence of a moirail, and with frenemies scarce on the ground, you make an effort to at least be honest with yourself.

Karkat drags you to the gadget room, hands waving the entire way. He knocks twice on the open door and barges in. The new tech doesn’t notice; he’s wearing goggles and ear protection, running a sheet of metal through a cutting machine. The room is a lot cleaner than it’s ever been. It still smells wet but there’s not much left of the stale takeout and fungal smell. Judging from the vaguely familiar appearances of the three robots with flourished pauldrons and sawteeth, you might actually get to shoot the deathbots tomorrow night, at least if they work. Even if he didn’t make them from scratch, uncovering them from whatever moldy pile they were stashed in is pretty impressive. You tell Equius that when he notices you and shuts the machine off, and you grin at him when he blushes and hurries to assure you that he’s inspected and corrected their wiring and that he is quite sure that they will perform to the required specifications. His earnestness is adorable, especially because he also looks extremely offended that you might think these were his design and not leftovers from Anleez’s reign of mismanagement. 

Karkat wanders off to marvel at the newly revealed stairs to the second level and you talk to Equius about the robots, their weaknesses and strengths, vulnerable points and weapons. You need to know as much as you can to make the fight look good. You’ve destroyed plenty of robots, but it’s good to be efficient. When you can manage showy destruction that still leaves plenty of salvageable parts or even whole systems, it keeps production running with less wait time. Equius seems to appreciate that, and it’s nice to find that he seems competent enough that he probably won’t accidentally cull himself in here. He seems personally offended by the tale of the rotting biomechs, and you laugh without thinking. You don’t mean to, you don’t want him to think that you’re laughing at him, but you can’t help it! You wholeheartedly believe that under his watch you will never have to worry about such “slovenly malfunctions”. The thought eases some of the tension you felt, caught between the necessities of work and the unplanned insistence of your new pale crush.

You exhaust the robots as a topic and convince him to give you a tour. In one night he’s already undone perigees of Anleez’s mess, so it really is like a new space. You can see all the way up the stairs to the next level and the doors to the prop room and costuming are almost clear. The door to costuming is propped open and you can hear Karkat, Baysweet and Nigeal in the distance.

Unfortunately, unlike talking about a shared experience like the bots, even if you’re approaching them from different directions, there’s only so many tools you can stare at while conversation trails off awkwardly and you have to notice that you still smell like sweaty sex and it’s late enough that if you don’t hurry home you’ll be stuck overday. You make your suddenly awkward goodbyes and you try to figure out what comes next in Project: Solve Or Squelch Your Crush On The Cute New Tech.

Still. It was a mistake to ask Karkat for advice. Such. A. Mistake.

 

~N~

At Karkat’s urging, you go on a series of pale blind dates trying to get Equius Zahhak and his stupidly pitiable face out of your mind.They are all horrible failures, even the folks that are genuinely interesting or untrollishly nice.

You toss one of them out of a purrbeast café for trying to pap you on the first date and settle in to finish your tea with a more charming four-footed companion. 

Another is an aspiring actormentor and wants to discuss your  _craft_. She also asks if you'd be willing to practice with her and you've met competent professionals in your field with less obvious sets of bucket eyes. You demur and try to change the topic. She outright pitch solicits you. You pay your half of the bill and leave. 

A third is actually in mourning for his oliveblood moirail, dead in an industrial accident last perigee, and while you feel really  _bad_ , you also feel really  _awkward_  sitting in a back booth in a spaceport café while a stranger tries not to hyperventilate. You end up patting him on the back while he keens and you glare at the other patrons when they look and maybe forty or so minutes later when he calms down, you lead him to the fresher and help clean him up with the thin fabric handkerchief Equius gave you last week.

You cleaned the little scrap of fabric and you meant to give it back, but you’ve been hoarding it in your pocket since your crush rewarded you with his favor after you triumphed on his behalf against the leftover newt-scum in the big biotank. Okay, so it wasn’t that epic, but you hang out with Karkat and film porn all night, it might have changed your sense of drama. Anleez took in his dead ash leaf's firenewt lusus and it died perigees before he did. Karkat had to send some of the maintenance minions on a commando run to seize and bury the troll-sized corpse because it smelled so bad, but he didn’t make them clean the biotank because it’s fragile and he didn’t trust him. Gross, but it wasn’t without benefits. You made Equius blush twice and stammer once and you admitted to knitting and unraveling your work and he didn’t laugh at you like Karkat did. He confessed that he didn't quite know what to do with himself when he didn't have a project. It was a fair exchange. 

You let Geovin keep the hanky and you wish him well and you walk him back to his hive because he might be a tall strong purpleblood, but he also seems fragile right now. And then you tell Karkat off because you  _did not expect that and what was he thinking?!_

Karkat is unrepentant and asks you if you think Geovin would like a young dumb sound tech instead, he has some spares.

You make it through another couple blind dates, including one with a tealblood who could be your eggmate and the two of you get in an argument over who gets to be the evil one and you lose at rock-fibrous communication substrate-bladekind but she forfeits anyways so you end up sneaking into her office on your night off and bossing her staff around nonsensically instead of pranking your co-workers with a body double.

The two of you take some fake _is-it-flush-or-pitch?_ teaser shots and send them to Karkat and to her kismesis and you make plans for her to meet you at your hive the next time Karkat’s over for a movie marathon and you both go hive laughing but it still doesn’t solve getting over your crush.

It doesn’t help that Equius is like _genius levels_ of competent. The re-purposed sawteeth bots suit their purpose on his second night of employment, but through the next several productions his work just gets  _better_. You come in even when you’re not needed, not just to see him, but to see his work. It’s amazing. You need to try harder to get over him. You let Karkat continue to set you up on blind pale dates.

You have an ash fling with Litrik Makree and her ex-moirail. Litrik used to work CG for the studio and she favors philosophy over intoxicants, so she’s actually not a bad conversationalist, even if she is a little pompous. It’s just a one day stand, but it’s nice to be back on solid ground for a moment, two people looking to you to be the voice of reason and direct them.

If you all end up grooming each other’s horns and Litrik and Ureete cooked you a week’s worth of meals while bitching at each other and competing for your judgements, it needed doing anyhow and they didn’t fight the  _whole_  time. You all agreed that it was worth it even if it was not  _entirely_  at a distance from pale activities. You like them both and Ureete does this positively adorable eyelash flutter when he’s cruising for a bruising. You exchange handles and get new VR furrenemies, and possible future on call ash-buddies, but still, your diamond is unmoved and yearns to learn more about Equius Zahhak.

...So maybe it wasn’t an  _unmitigated_  disaster, but it definitely wasn’t  _successful_.

Karkat assures you that he has another idea, and that’s how you end up at a late night municipal laundering facility halfway across the city with Equius after  _someone_  sabotages your appliances into premature hibernation cycles. Sorting your unmentionables and cozy pajamas in public? Not the most embarrassing thing. Watching Equius Zahhak utterly fail to fold his shirts neatly and blush uncontrollably when you help?  _Lethal levels of adorable_.

You don’t know if you’re going to hug Karkat or stuff him in your snoozing clothes cleaning appliance. Possibly both.

You don’t actually manage to talk. You are both tongue-tied. Then a box of detergent flakes explodes when Equius picks it up and maybe you laugh a little at the snow in his hair and you tell him about your sad hibernating appliances that think it's winter and he just stands there not saying anything and blinking and okay, you’re just going to shut up now because clearly that was a line, and you slink back out to your personal scuttlebuggy with your basket of clothes and you bang your head on the wheel until it honks in protest.

You should have known then to stop listening to Karkat’s advice, but eating hivemade casserole clearly threw you off the proper game trail because you let him continue to direct this sad collision like it’s his own personal fantasy of directormentoring. Karkat finds plenty of excuses for you to visit the gadget room, or Equius to relay reports through you, and you should cut him off, but you can't quite make yourself do it.

There is a part of you that is lit by this beautiful strange hope, this feeling of anticipation and care. There is another part of you that guards that hope with ferocity, like it's not just a hard won kill but your very own offspring of the flesh.

It's not a civilized sort of feeling, not at _all_.

If pale is supposed to make you soft and complacent, or to engender that in another, perhaps you are _not quite right_. 

And so you continue to drop off hardcopy technical specifications and work orders, small shipments of supplies, and sometimes the odd synthprotein bar and electrolyte drink. And you continue to catch only glimpses of the person that dwells beneath Equius Zahhak's stiff formality, like a figure behind a suncurtain, quickly twitched shut. Each glimpse feeds that light inside you. 

 

~N~

When you find the wiggler tech herd playing their usual between-takes game of Bucket-Pile-Cull and discussing Equius, in addition to their usual candidates of celebrities and department heads and whatnot, you firmly and professionally remind them that contributing to a hostile work environment adversely affects production and is therefore against all of their contracts.

And if a few of those electing "Cull" have less than optimal work weeks, well, adult entertainment is for adults and if they're going to be wigglers about it, they can go hive and cry in their grubflakes. 

 

~E~ 

Ms. Leijon is a professional, with an industrious work ethic and cordial relationships with all her co-workers of similar hierarchy.

If she visits you often, it is not a gesture of any interest any stronger than a professional one relating to how your efforts will suit her own. She may well do the same with the costuming department head, or makeup, or sound, or lighting.

It is not a sign of any favor. It is not arrogant to acknowledge that despite your age, similar to that of many of the unspecialized techs, infamous in the studio for youthful foalish decisions, your efforts have a STRONG effect on the final production. It is merely fact. Cold, hard, and tasting of blood from your bitten inner cheek. 

 

~K~

You don’t know what they’re doing wrong, but you make  _great_  plans. If an actormentor and a wiggler tech smart enough  _not_  to end up in  _The Wrap_  despite working with industrial machines all night can’t get it together and make pale squishy love confessions at the Bubbles Bubbles Laundromat, then _clearly they’re just not trying hard enough_.

 

~N~

You can’t really cook, but you can hunt and you can roast beast. There’s not much to hunt in the city, at least not things you’d eat, or feed to others, so you order up some wild caught roast from a reputable supplier, something a bit nicer than you usually manage when you’re not just ordering out. Karkat told you that Equius likes hoofbeasts, which has been the most helpful he’s been what with the pushing the two of you together until you can’t help but stumble at his shoves. It’s not the most tender cut, but you stew it in the plug-in appliance overnight and spoon it into a covered dish. Does that count as casserole?

Equius usually forgets to eat or take the midnight break and tonight you’re not actually on duty, but plenty of your co-workers show up when they aren’t so it won’t be odd. Strangely enough for a group of people that spend their nights producing porn, most of you are… awkward outside of work. If you meander in and then meander over to the botshop, some might notice, but they won’t really  _notice_.

 

~N~

_Ack. Worse plan ever. Abort. Abort. Karkat is terrible at advice. So terrible._

You hurry home with your lukewarm dish of sadness-inducing overcooked muscle. You eat it anyhow, because it would be a waste not to and your mom taught you better than that. And then you run through all your nightly exercises a second time because that long ago winter taught you that anything can be ignored for a little while if you’re exhausted enough. You keep going until you feel like you’re on fire and when you stop and wonder what it would be like to feel Equius’s cool hands against your sweaty brow, or at the sweaty nape of your neck, you laugh until you scream into a throw pillow and then eviscerate it with your teeth.

Then you look up vegetarian casserole recipes.

 

~N~

Several nights later, your studio hive no longer smells like burned grain and you have two not-objectionable casseroles in disposable pans in an insulated bag. You also have two very smug ash leaves that both believe they have proved themselves the superior culinarian. When you left they were cuddled on your couch trash talking each other. Ex-moirails indeed.

You’re so nervous you can’t wait for nightfall so you suit up in a suncloak and hat and head in early. Equius is in the shop when you arrive, like he never left, but he’s not alone. There are two trolls on the main table, where he usually has a deathbot in progress.

The moment that you know it’s not a crush? Not  _just_  a crush? Okay, so you need to back up just a bit…

Equius is kind of a snob. Just a little. He never explicitly states it, but when Karkat orders him around or tells Snatchframe off or when the herd of population-proportionate, mostly warmblood, sound, light, and maintenance techs get up in his space in the shop, he gets tense.

It’s not just being ordered around or being crowded, he seems to really _like_ getting assignments from Snatchframe, hangs off his every bit of absentminded praise. And he does everything Karkat asks, sometimes he over delivers as if to prove he can, like he resents that Karkat underestimated him and Karkat doesn’t seem to notice that frustration. But the difference between how he reacts to orders from coldbloods and warmbloods is noticeable, and when an indigo lighting tech dropped a bionervepak and a yellow sound tech posed with the shattered hank of it in his hair,  _everyone_  heard him bellow at the  _sound tech_.

So it’s really significant, to you at least, that he’s sewing up a maroonblood’s shoulder, an empty bionervepak on the table. You watch them for a while from your perch by the costuming door on the second level, and when he finishes with that he kneels down and tinkers with the brownblood’s prosthetic ankle.

You watch all three of them and maybe it’s creepy, but you just don’t want to disturb them, not when they all seem so calm, the two strangers a bit rueful, and Equius even laughing, once, when they pantomime a fight and try to convince him to install blades in the fake foot. You wait until they look almost done and you creep back through costuming with your hard-won casseroles and you knock on the shop’s main door to propose a picnic. Maybe you didn’t anticipate a chaperoned date, but that’s probably for the best so you don't run out of conversation material and into the territories of super awkward silence.

When you poke your head in you get three identical looks of surprise and then two identical looks of welcome when you state that you’ve brought food. Equius’s expression is more complicated. Not  _unwelcoming_ , but you’re not sure what he’s thinking. You wish you knew what he thought of you. You wish you knew if it was hopeless or not and you can’t tell which would be better. Because a crush is just that. It doesn’t mean you’d actually be good for one another.

 

~E~

You get stranded in the elevator late at night with Ms. Leijon and a dolly of delicate parts: several dozen bionerve armatures in small culture tanks, three experimental laser gyroscopes, an ouroboros biobattery and such. First the lights go off then the motion stops with a distant but not precipitous sort of crunch and the emergency lights go on. You don’t look at your unfortunate and inappropriate pale crush when she growls. You’re both going to be late getting home. Possibly you won’t be getting home tonight, you’ll need to get out, fix whatever the issue is, and get your culture tanks hooked into external power sources within the next few hours.

You don’t notice that she’s blushing as much as you are. The emergency lights are an odd shade of almost teal that casts everything into strange shades and shadows. First you try levering the doors open, only to find that you’re trapped precisely between floors so that there is no exit, not even one likely to accidently snap someone in half when the power is restored. You end up boosting her up to the emergency hatch at her request, and you should not find it so charming that she unscrews both latches with a precise claw twist before you can pass her your multifunction pocket tool. She shimmies through the hatch and you hear the click of the safety brake seconds later, locking the elevator car in place so that it can’t resume and smear a maintenance technician into paste. Or one of the studio’s primaries, as the present circumstances have so developed.

You resign yourself to waiting and idly nudge the stacked dolly. Nothing moves, not even the wheels. You did engage the braking mechanism. You suppose you could kill some time checking that everything is at right angles. Maybe design a hover-dolly efficient enough to just take the stairs and avoid more claustrophobic environs.

“Eq!”

You don’t really notice when Ms. Leijon starts calling your name, you’re already descending into the concentration state that lets you work for hours without noticing outside stimuli, or minding current conditions.

“Equius Zahhak, are you coming or not?!” You feel a resonating sort of poke and realize you didn’t walk into a wall, Ms. Leijon just flicked you in the horn.

You look up, and if something in your chest feels oddly hopeful and strangely light and you feel like you are standing in a laundering facility covered in soap flakes, you can’t match the not-pain to any exact diagram of troll organs and malfunctions.

Ms. Leijon is reaching down through the hatch and waving to you. You’re tall enough to touch the hatchway with both hands, but it’s not the best leverage to lift yourself through. You reach up with both arms to illustrate this and she leans further down, gets a good grip on your elbows, squatting on one side of the hatch so that her head and torso clear easily.

“On three, Eq. I can call you that, right?”

Your mouth is still gaping open when you forget to jump on three and she hauls you up anyhow, your hands grasping at her forearms in a reciprocal grip to her own, her own strength perhaps not a match for your own overpowering power, but impressive and entirely honestly honed. You don’t have time to warn her that you really can’t be trusted to touch people without harming them, it’s one of the reasons you prefer working with bots. She seats you on the top of the car with her and grins at you, teeth and eye-shine brighter than anything else in the dim light spilling up through the hatch. You don’t know if you’re smiling back, your cheeks and chest hurt and your duck your head, turn away to climb to your feet and grab the shaft ladder.

“You’ve got a strong grip. That’s good.” She tells your back. You don’t turn to try to see if there are bruises rising on her arms. It’s too dark. And you don’t want to think of hurting her.

The two of you climb to the top, and exit into the drive and control housing. It’s not a mechanical failure but a one use bug. Someone stopped the elevator deliberately, though you don’t know why or if it mattered who was inconvenienced.

You clean out the bug, reset the system, and climb back down cleaning and lubricating the most objectionable of the delayed maintenance services on the way and explaining things to Ms. Leijon as you go. She’s got a firm hand with a scrub brush and when she vows to empty the sootvac into the service techs’ lunches, you’re surprised into laughing. You exchange stories in the almost dark and it’s not so bad as holding her gaze.

You tell her that your specialty is biomechanics because it’s more versatile, even if in some circumstances it’s less STRONG than strictly mechanical work, and that you thought you’d be doing fleet work but that circumstances determined otherwise. You tell her about Aurthour and that you’re worried and you’ve never told anyone that, even if Nitram probably guessed when you exchanged favor for favor, your expertise for his. He escaped culling, so far as you know, and you haven’t seen or heard of him since. You tell her about that too, even if you shouldn’t, especially not when you can’t see her expression to judge if she considers you a traitor.

She tells you about her lusus, and how much she loved her, and the winter when she almost died and how much she misses real trees and grasses, the kind that isn’t CG. You don’t ask her how she came here, but you ask her why she stays. She tells you about Vantas and her affection for him, and you feel a surge of unexpected jealousy until it’s clear that she means flush, and then you feel a surge of, relief, and alarm, and a wish that feelings could be grounded properly like electricity. She tells you about your co-workers and the in jokes that you don’t notice, being new and being isolated in the shop. You ask about the Directormentor and what he did for the decasweeps before The Return when there was no adult filming on planet. Was he in propagandering?

“Oh! Hehe. Yeah, but there’s something you should know since you’re one of us now. Snatchframe didn’t get his title from directing, or hoarding film, no matter what he wants you to think! It’s kind of funny though you  _can’t_  let on that you know. He got dumped post-pre-Ascension bucket and his flush flame told him off in front of the drones and all the neighbors for being so obsessed with… well, if you can’t guess, maybe I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

Oh. _OH_. You can feel blood rushing to your face and are grateful for the dark.

You pull open a floor door for her and close it after, release the car brake, climb back in, and finally arrive at your destination, almost three hours past dawn, four hours after this all started. Ms. Leijon meets you at your floor and helps you get the small biotanks set up. Your hands are trembling just like how you sometimes get when Aurthour isn’t around to remind you to eat, or at least have a drink of milk, and you drop a tank.

If last sweep you would have broken more in a fit of rage, now you just close your eyes and wait for the shatter and splash of 4.3% of a perigee’s budget to litter your feet.

There’s no shatter. No splash. You open your eyes and Ms. Leijon’s holding the dropped tank, fluid barely frothed. She plugs it into the specialized shelving unit with its branching powerplugs.

“See, we’re not a terrible team.” She stands up and reaches out, slowly, as if to give you time to step back, or say ‘no’. She straightens your shirt, two little tugs to the collar, one to the bottom. She smooths the front once and lets her hand lie over your heart. She licks her lips and if she wasn’t a successful actormentor, you’d call her expression shy.

There’s a smudge of grease on her forehead and, as if you’re watching a film of your own actions, you feel your thumb on your tongue, see yourself reach out and carefully, carefully wipe at the smudge. It smears, but she’s smiling at you and you find your hand trapped in both of hers. You think you could stare at her for a long time and still be unable to remember the exact measurements of her features and physique, or managing that, still be unable to match her in a metal form.

She lets go of you and you stare at your hand until you find a grain bar has appeared in it. You remove the wrapper and eat it, bemused. It’s late and you sit yourself on a pile of synthetic skin to rest as she leaves, only to find yourself blinking awake in the hours of pre-dusk, according to the wall chrono, your only company besides the quiet of the shop and the hum of the biotanks.

 

~N~

You don’t know if you want to laugh or scream or do both. You think Equius returns your feelings. And you don’t think he noticed, but he even called you by your first name once. You want to bury your hands in his hair and braid it.

 

~N~

You exit by the front door, the one no one’s been using this week because the tadplop tree is just about ready to release all its sticky seed pods and no one wants to duck under just as they all simultaneously drop.

You linger just past the strongest shadows of the tree until Equius joins you. You think that he’s about to speak, you hope he’s going to actually use your first name again, when somewhere you hear a fan turn on, one of the industrial ones for “flying hair” moments. Moments later, you are plastered in tadplop seeds. Equius too. You can’t see Karkat. You can’t hear any giggling from his tech herd minions. But you know, just like you know that this has gone too far and that there’s no one better than a mechanically-minded moirail to help you exact purroper revenge.

A rumble of thunder rolls through the muggy air and the breeze suddenly smells of rain. You look at the door, behind which lies most of the adults you know, all of whom are either gossips or too stupid to know when to not point out the obvious, and you look back up at Equius. His lips are pressed tightly together in an expression of disgust as he pulls a seed off his cheek, a little spot of adhesive seed coat left behind. He looks at you, a quick glance from the side of his eye, and if he can’t quite look at you dead on, he doesn’t look any more eager to go back inside than you feel.

“You know what the worst thing about tadplop seeds is?”

He meets your gaze and shakes his head and if he doesn't make an inquisitive sound, you still know you have his full attention. You think you could get drunk on his attention.

“As soon as they get wet, the mucus coat rehydrates. Then it’s even harder to get them off, and they smell even worse.”

He looks at you, and you can see the blush rising along his cheeks even as his nose wrinkles. He pulls a short stick from his bag and presses a button. It unfolds into a rainshield. He offers it to you, with a little bow, as if you’d just take it and leave him.

You put your hands out, over his fist, and you hold on.

“We could share you know. Though I think you should hold it, you’re taller.”

He swallows, and you want to trace the lines of his neck tendons. You feel like you’ve been more than ridiculous enough already not to have just said it and you know that he won’t move as long as you hold on to him. He’s afraid of hurting people.

“I like you. In a pale way. In a long-term and sharing way. And I’ve tried to shake it off because I didn’t want to feel so strongly about someone when it might be for just a little while, and I didn’t want to pressure you into anything because we work together, but I don’t think it’s going away.”

You study his solemn face, the twitch of those elegant ears, one covered in tadplops, his hair a mess. He tries not to react to most things. It’s like he thinks it’s a test. It’s not. It’s just life. That’s the scary part. You can cheat on a test if you know what it’s looking for. You have to push yourself just a little further now.

“My place is close enough, and I could use some help pulling off seeds. You do my back and I’ll do yours and we’ll see what comes of it?”

He’s frozen under your gaze until he nods, and he would probably blush more if it were literally possible, the gray of his facial scales each outlined brilliantly in his blue. The handle of the rainshield cracks like another roll of thunder.

“Yes.” the sound barely squeaks out of his mouth but you can feel the rumble of it in his thorax, contained. He wants this too.

You let go of his hand, but only to put one of your own on his elbow and start off with a little hip nudge. He follows like his first super awesome talent is robots and his second is following your lead. It’s a welcome trait in a costar and going to be amazing in a moirail. Your place is  _not_  close by, it’s a good thirty minute walk, forty or more at this stroll, and you’re both going to be thoroughly soaked and covered in smelly germinating tadplops. It’s the perfect excuse for a bath, especially because you know how much he hates being dirty once he’s not in a work fugue. He’s  _fastidious_. Like Mom. You think she’d approve. You wonder if he’ll be comfortable with you meeting Aurthour or if you should wait a little while to ask.

You’re going to see how far down that blush goes.

<> 

 

.

.

.

 

|You are now entering the aftermath.|

NL: Karkat, you know how you k33p purromising to write me some redrom?

KV: NOT WITH SNATCHFRAME ON SET.

NL: Your contract’s flexible, do you want me to quote the relevant sections, or can we skip that and get to the awesome part?

KV: FINE. DAZZLE ME, YOU PRIMA DONNA.

NL: You know the main bot from our last production?

KV: HOW COULD I FORGET, THREE TECHS TRIED TO “ROMANCE” IT. I HAD TO PROVIDE A BAG OF ICE KNOWING IT WAS HEADED FOR SOMEONE’S BONEBULGE.

NL: Furrget that part, you whinny. Equius likes challenges and he’s made an even more realistic one. It looks like me. We can literally switch places and leave anyone but a close furriend to guess.

KV: NEPETA, THAT’S LIKE THE INTRO TO A CREEPY HORROR. “AND THEN WE FOUND HER, STUFFED AND MOUNTED ON THE WALL. WE DIDN’T EVEN KNOW SHE WAS MISSING.”.

NL: Wrong genre! Try melancholy tragic romance. Ghost in the machine. Add some CG and fancy costumes. Baysweet and Blythe would be up for it. And we’ll budget for the good stuff to lure the better CG adepts over.

KV: ARE WE GOING TO GET CULLED FOR DEMORALIZING HELMSMEN SADS?

NL: No! It will be all kinds of take your heart by solar-storm sad and 100% Condesce appurroved. At least I’m assuming that’s what you’ll manage, since you’ll be writing it. Try to do some cool aliens too, Eq needs a challenge and he’ll pout if you give all the hard parts to CG.

KV: FINE. TWIST MY FRONDS A BIT MORE AND NEVER MENTION THAT AGAIN.

NL: No twisting needed, but if you’re lonely we’ll leave you some space in the pile.

KV: DEVIANT.

NL: Yes, but I wear it with purride. You should try it. Not caring if anyone disapproves. Though it’s better when you know you have someone that has your back. _That’s_ better than sex.

KV: I THINK ERIDAN’S PREPARING TO DUMP ME.

NL: ...

NL: Come on over, there’s room in the pile, I have the entire series of Shylok and Watsin cued up and Ur33te left another casserole. Equius is out. I’ll do your nails and set you up on blind dates.

KV: YOU UNDERSTAND THAT THAT’S A CONFLICTED MESSAGE RIGHT THERE, RIGHT?

NL: DadMom, get your Vant-ass over here. Your pale purrpriety is safe with me.

 KV: FINE. SEE YOU IN HALF AN HOUR.

|NL has signed off.|

|Window override initiated. Her Imperious Fucking Condescension has commandeered your Shoutbox.|

)(IC: Buoy, I told you the bug in the elevator would work. How about some tanks?


End file.
